Rwandan Priest Turns Himself in

A Catholic priest accused of slaughtering parishioners during Rwanda's 1994 genocide has abandoned a church sanctuary in Tuscany and surrendered to a UN war crimes tribunal in Tanzania.

Father Athanase Seromba faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for allegedly helping to murder 2,000 people by bulldozing his church on top of them and watching as survivors were shot, clubbed and stabbed.

He flew from Italy on Wednesday night after agreeing to end a seven-year stay which had become increasingly embarrassing for the Vatican and Italian government, which faced international pressure to hand him over.

The international war crimes tribunal's senior prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, is thought to have personally lobbied the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to hand over the priest.

The trial of Father Seromba, 38, in Arusha is expected to start soon. He faces life in prison if convicted.

In a farewell letter to Tuscana Oggi, a church newspaper, he said: "In order to deal with accusations against me I have decided to go personally to Arusha to respond to everything. I shouted high and low to proclaim my innocence but my cries were not heard."

He is accused of siding with the ethnic Hutu majority during an attempted extermination of the ethnic Tutsis between April and June 1994. Gangs of militiamen, known as Interahamwe, killed about 800,000 people.

Witnesses claim the Nyange parish priest herded more than 2,000 Tutsis into his church, where they hoped to find sanctuary.

According to the tribunal's prosecutors, he ordered and paid for two bulldozers to raze the building. The indictment said: "Soon after, Father Seromba ordered the Interahamwe militiamen to clean the 'rubbish' [meaning dead bodies]. The corpses were buried in a mass grave."

Testimonies gathered by African Rights, a London human rights group, said he shot survivors with a rifle and urged the killers to spare no one. They said he was a known Hutu militant.

Dozens of clerics and nuns suspected of having blood on their hands were spirited to western Europe by the Catholic church after a Tutsi force ousted the Interahamwe.

Father Seromba was moved to Italy, ostensibly to study, and after adopting an assumed name he served as deputy parish priest at a church in Florence.

When confronted by journalists in Italy, he dismissed the accusations as lies peddled by Tutsi-dominated interest groups and said that he left Nyange before the slaughter.